rey's reflections
by peppermintteababy
Summary: one-shot of a series of visions Rey experiences under Luke's apprenticeship


"_Why are you angry?"_

"_Get lost."_

The memories came in splotches, random trickles of long lost scenes. They never fit into a familiar story, something she might recall from her past. They were so old. But they were hers. Something she could hold onto, even though she didn't quite understand them.

The memories came while she slept, in the form of dreams (or _visions_, as Luke called them), half forgotten by morning, taunting her, teasing her.

Rey tried to ignore her visions. She hated the way they made her feel - clueless, hopeless, like she were missing out on something she had already experienced, but then had been robbed of remembrance. It wasn't fair.

Her second vision came midday, while Rey meditated in the shade of the shadow cast by the island Ach-To's stone peak. Luke had instructed her to quiet her mind and let her thoughts clear, relax and allow the Force to guide her as it will.

She had been meditating since dawn.

She couldn't quiet her mind. Her thoughts - heavy and brooding - dwelled on the vision she'd had the night before. Two voices so familiar, yet grasping the knowledge of their owners was impossible. She drowned in frustration, loneliness of her dilemma, in her own fear of losing what she had only just discovered.

In the ever-growing chill breeze beneath the mountain.

Luke had disappeared an hour before. He hadn't offered any explanation of his return, destination, (_anything_), though Rey had asked. Only turning once more to advise her to rest and meditate further on her vision, he'd left in a conglomeration of buried worry and obvious deep thought.

She knew of his past. From the stories - legends whispered by grandparents as bedtime stories to children. Rey thought she knew this man, and yet, he was still a stranger.

Rey barred her mind from the effects of the cold, blocking out the signals that alerted her to the rising goose bumps on her shoulders and arms. She had to concentrate. Rey had to focus.

Recalling each single detail of the last night's vision, Rey breathed at let her mind release its thoughts into the Force.

Immediately, a warm, tingly feeling enveloped her and she could hear the voices again. The first, a tentative, childish whisper of caution. Then the harsh strike of the second. She outlined the flow hand hiss of each tone's drop and curve.

She listened.

"_Why won't you play with me anymore?"_

_It wasn't just voices this time. Rey could see. First a face, too blurry to make out to whom it belonged, but clarity of emotions made up for that. The feelings resonating from the foggy image spoke volumes of irritation (and was that resignation?)_

_The face was swept away with the next words._

"_I can't."_

_Resignation. Pain. More than pain. Desperation, reluctancy. Fear._

_Stronger than before, they were all there. Nearly overpowering, the long-past revival of emotions threatened to send Rey into a spiral of tears. She could see them in the eyes of her vision's characters._

_And then she saw something silver - a surface almost tarnished to the base of the metal. It tremored in the child speaker's hands._

"_What's wrong?"_

_The vision began to fade. With every last measure of her untrained Force-focused skills, Rey strained to hear the last word._

"_Run."_

Rey didn't have another vision for days following that one.

After Luke returned, he listened to her dream and departed once more, never pausing to remark on the absurdity of the events of her dream - the darkened face and the silver relic. Never taking a moment to explain with the knowledge he had she could see crystalline on his features.

She knew he was hiding something from her.

And she so desperately wanted to ask, to know, to understand her past that this man had somehow locked away into a place in her mind she could not access.

The rejection of her questions as the legendary Luke Skywalker left their solitary, little island for another long period of meditation burned at Rey's heart and soul. She found solace only in the ambiguity of slumber, the stirring lights of morning, and her own afternoon meditations.

While on the ancient island, the location of the first Jedi Temple, Rey never had to work hard or look far to find sources of food or drink. Never had she to climb tons of sand dunes to see absolutely nothing but miles more of that same gritty gold. She was never shoved into the position of fighting for her daily bread - her only life substance.

There resided, on the surface, only peace and simplicity.

But underneath, the power and ancient history that coursed through the veins of the island, the stone dwellings built and carved into its surfaces, the very stairs that dozens of feet had climbed with vigor so long ago to their place of rest and peace, chipped at the walls someone had erected around her mind - her memories. They slinked closer every day - the knowledge of her past, they were sure to provide her, taunted the young woman. She could almost touch - just with the tips of her fingers - the tendrils of ethereality that composed her hidden memories.

Yet, the closer they drew to her, the more slippery they were to catch and hold onto.

She almost gave up hope.

And then, on the wind of her subconscious, during the late hours of her wanderings between dreams she would forget later, Rey had her third vision - and not only did she simply see it, she _experienced _it as well.

Rey almost mistook it for nothing but the dark recesses of her unconscious. It began so black and silent.

_Suddenly, she gazed through the eyes of a child - herself nearly fourteen years ago. A hand shot out of the mist and flashed before her vision, a being following it to grab hold of her shoulder and stand by her side in but a moment. Raising goose-bumps on Rey's neck, the being spoke in frantic, terror-stricken tones._

"_Rey. Rey, listen to me."_

_The urgency was overwhelming._

"_Rey, you have to run. Go now. Find our hiding place - the one I showed you, remember that? Go there. Don't leave until-"_

_Deathly silence._

_Both Rey and her child alter ego shook from the unexpected rush of emotions - horror, pain, _fear - _then the lack of them - utter emptiness._

"_Oh no."_

_The being stumbled away, nearly bringing Rey to the ground with it. A strangled gasp. A scream from the distance. The air was buzzing with heat and pain and Rey could feel every bit of it enhanced in her mind._

"_Run kid! Go! Don't look back!"_

"_Nooo!" Her own voice screamed against the free fall feeling that boosted her over ten feet away from the being. She felt it before. She knew what it was._

"_GO!"_

_She fled. Her tiny feet striking the earth harder than ever before. Nothing like the speed of her training - _faster_. Nothing like the endurance built over years of hard concentration - _stronger. _Nothing like anything she had ever exhibited to her teachers -_ better. _Rey was at her five year old finest._

_But it was too much. Fear. Confusion. The emptiness that threatened to send her heart into the abyss._

When Rey awoke, it wasn't with a bolt upright gasp and a cold sweat like she'd expect from a nightmare. Not even an involuntary cry or whimper. She just. Awoke.

Her heart raced wilding and her mind buzzed with new information, flooding in from the burst dams in the walls of her mind. Concentration was impossible.

Yet, when Luke's eyes focused on her features not a moment later, he saw only a face as placid as the moon at midnight.

And he said, in a tone she could not quite sense the meaning of,

"Rey. It's time you knew."


End file.
